Allocation remains same as last financial year despite unspent funds
By TCN News,
New Delhi: The Centre on Saturday announced ‘Nai Manzil’, an integrated education and livelihood scheme to help school dropout youth from minority communities help find better employment. The government also continued with the same allocation for the minority ministry – Rs 3738 crore – as last year.
“An integrated education and livelihood scheme called ‘Nai Manzil’ will be launched this year to enable Minority Youth who do not have a formal school-leaving certificate to obtain one and find better employment,” Arun Jaitley, Union Finance Minister, said while presenting the annual union budget for the year 2015-16.
File photo
The allocation for the Ministry of Minority Affairs is being protected, Jaitley said, adding, “The BE (budget estimate) for the year is Rs 3,738 crore.”
As reported by TwoCircles.net on the occasion of Minority Rights Day in December 2014, the change in regime – BJP-led NDA was elected with an overwhelming majority in May 2014 – has not meant any change in the apathetic state of affairs that was the hallmark of the previous UPA government for last two terms.
The Ministry’s annual budget provision had stood at Rs 3711 crore under Plan for year 2014-15. The total plan outlay was Rs 2469.00 crore with another Rs 1232.00 crore for Multi-Sectoral Development Programme for Minorities.
As against the budget estimate for 2014-15 for Rs 1232.00 crore, the revised estimate remained at only Rs 767.00 crore. It means for whatever reasons, the government was not able to spend the allocated budget amount for the last year. Despite that the government allocated Rs 1232.00 crore during this financial year, possibly the reason why Jaitley said, “The allocation for the Ministry of Minority Affairs is being protected.”
TwoCircles.net could not immediately establish the reason why these funds had remained unspent in the last financial year.
Reacting to the budgetary provisions for the minorities, Dr SQR Ilyas, Welfare Party of India (WPI) national president, said: “There is no change in the budget allocation for minorities, whatever little increase is there is because the government didn’t release the 4rth quarter fund of the last budget which has been added to the present allocation.”
The Union Budget also announced support an exhibition ‘The Everlasting Flame’ to show-case civilization and culture of Parsis, a miniscule minority community.